“The Bay State, which hiked its minimum wage from $8 to $9 at the start of 2015 and to $10 on the first day of 2016, is now mired in its longest stretch of net job losses since the recession in both the retail and the leisure and hospitality sectors, Labor Department data show.
Retail sector employment in February was down 2,200 from its post-recession peak of 354,100 in July, seasonally adjusted data show. In fact, retail employment is below its level in November 2014, before the first step of the state’s wage hike went into effect.
While the retail sector has no shortage of challenges, especially competition from Amazon (AMZN) and other online rivals, retail employment has been on the rise nationally, growing by 416,000 between November 2014 and February 2016.”
“While earlier figures had pointed to job losses, revisions to the data wiped those losses away. Yet a closer look reveals that the impact of the wage hikes may not be entirely benign after all. In the leisure and hospitality sector, the average workweek over the past year was 1.5 hours shorter than it was in 2013, a drop of 5%.
Here’s an even bigger shock: In this modest pay sector dominated by restaurants and hotels, the average weekly wage of $477.86 in February was actually down 8.3% from $521.29 in June 2014 — before the wage hikes began.
Though some of the data is subject to revision, it seems that the help of higher wages is being offset to a great extent by fewer hours of work and perhaps a leveling of pay scales, as jobs that used to pay far more than the minimum may no longer do so.”
“A tax advocacy group on Wednesday revealed that Americans spend more on taxes than their whole budget for food, clothing and housing.
The Tax Foundation, in its annual report on when the nation as a whole has earned enough to pay its taxes, announced the date as April 24.”
“— Collectively, Americans will spend more on taxes in 2016 than they will on food, clothing, and housing combined.
— Americans will pay $3.3 trillion in federal taxes and $1.6 trillion in state and local taxes, for a total bill of almost $5.0 trillion, or 31 percent of the nation’s income.”
“In 2011, we produced the Every Single One series for PJ Media about an unprecedented wave of ideological hiring of leftist attorneys into the career ranks of the Justice Department. The series documented the partisan and radical background of every single one of the 113 new Justice Department lawyers hired into the Obama Civil Rights Division from January 2009 to January 2011.
With the help of PJ Media, we will now be updating that revealing report — and sharing details about the background of Justice Department attorneys hired since 2011. Because we have obtained all of the resumes of the attorney hires in the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice since then.
And once again, every single one of them has an intensely ideological background.”
“The tentacles of the Division reach into virtually every crevice of American life. Federal statutes, under the banner of protecting civil rights, reach home lending, football stadium and theater seating, voting, elections, education, college admissions, apartment rentals, prisons, hiring practices, the use of English, special education programs, religious liberty, abortion clinic protests, arrests, law enforcement, voter rolls, insane asylums, state and local government hiring, swimming pool lift chairs, bathtub design, Spanish language ballots, school discipline, and even if boys can dress in drag in high school.”
“The Justice Department’s own inspector general recognized this as a problem in a report he released in 2013. The report criticized the Division’s Voting Section for hiring a majority of its lawyers from only five well-known liberal advocacy organizations (including the National Council of La Raza and the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund) and passing “over candidates who had stellar academic credentials and litigation experience with some of the best law firms in the country.”
“We documented instance after instance after instance of abuse of power by the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division. In some cases it involved theft and perjury. In others it involved high heels and comfort horses. It also included “grotesque prosecutorial abuse.” In nearly every instance it involved ideas far outside the mainstream of American life, and far outside the limited legal, statutory authority of the Division.
The old adage goes “personnel is policy.”
If presidential candidates really want to stop the madness, the first place to look is the Civil Rights Division. Many may have read our work at PJ Media and simply assumed a new president can just snap his or her fingers in January 2017 and make it all go away. But alas, no. Most of the lawyers we featured in 2011 are embedded career civil servants and cannot be removed because of the restrictions of a merit protection system 100 years out of date.”
… Trump is a world-class complainer (he is never being treated “fairly”) but a bush-league preparer. A nomination contest poses policy and process tests, and he is flunking both.
Regarding policy, he is flummoxed by predictable abortion questions because he has been pro-life for only 15 minutes, and because he has lived almost seven decades without giving a scintilla of thought to any serious policy question.
Regarding process, Trump, who recently took a week-long vacation from campaigning, has surfed a wave of free media to the mistaken conclusion that winning a nomination involves no more forethought than he gives to policy. He thinks he can fly in, stroke a crowd’s ideological erogenous zones, then fly away. He knows nothing about the art of the political deal. …
The nomination process, says Jeff Roe, Cruz’s campaign manager, “is a multilevel Rubik’s Cube. Trump thought it was a golf ball — you just had to whack it.” Roe says the Cruz campaign’s engagement with the granular details of delegate maintenance is producing a situation where “the guy who is trying to hijack the party runs into a guy with a machine gun.”
Trump, the perpetually whining “winner,” last won something on March 22, in Arizona. …
I’ve never been a listener of Rush, but I realize many are. He apparently has been reluctant to take on Trump this year — here’s a column from a listener who laments that, noting the unfortunate division among conservatives that has resulted from the sad smash-up of the (so far) 2016 GOP presidential race.
A few weeks ago, Jonah Goldberg poignantly put into words how so many of us feel. “I hate this. I hate it. I hate attacking people I respect,” he wrote. He continued: “But I honestly and sincerely don’t see this as a mere principled disagreement. I see this as an argument about whether or not we should set fire to some principles in a foolish desire to get on the right side of some ‘movement.’ I have never been more depressed about the state of American politics or the health of the conservative movement.”
Goldberg’s words echo my sentiments. The worst part about the rise of Trump is how it has forced so many of us to take sides, sides split by an ever-widening divide. And I think that’s where the frustrations that so many of us feel toward Limbaugh lie. So many of us have depended on him for decades to be our voice of conservative reason.
In the first season of HBO’s “True Detective,” Marty asked Rust if he ever wondered if he was a bad man. “No, I don’t wonder,” Rust said. “The world needs bad men. We keep the other bad men from the door.” …
… Trump has shown an astonishing lack of preparedness for the job he seeks. Dismissing his myriad other flaws, his disregard for even the slightest attempt to learn, to grow into the candidate that so many want him to be, should be insulting to a man as intelligent and self-made as Limbaugh. But yet it isn’t. He refuses to identify the bad man at the door.
Friday morning at 11:06 a.m., I tuned in to Limbaugh’s show, just as I do almost every day. Then I did something different: I turned his show off. Not out of anger or frustration, but out of respect for the man whose voice and ideals have served as my political compass through the years. Sadly, he’s not there anymore. And I’d rather remember him that way.
________________________________________________
It’s amazing that now we see proliferation of columns and letters like the one provided by Donna J, as if only *now,* with a guy the likes of *Trump* things have gone (or could go) too far. No, that point is way back there, a number of elections ago, when we Christians committed to a failed lesser of evils approach. It shouldn’t come as any surprise to us that we are where we are, both as a “conservative” movement and a country as a whole. This is what happens when we ignore God. It’s in the Bible.
Please point out to me if I am misunderstanding what is being said. But I am skeptical that we are actually paying more in taxes than on food, clothing, and housing combined. If we are paying, in general, 31% of our income in taxes, & if we are indeed paying more in taxes than on those other needs, then this would mean that we can manage to pay less than 31% of our income on food, clothing, and housing combined. That doesn’t sound right.
What am I missing? Or are those stats an exaggeration?
I believe they’re speaking of the country as a whole, based on the billions spent on those 3 combined and all taxes paid combined as well. You can see the details here.
“Methodology
In the denominator, we count every dollar that is officially part of net national income according to the Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the numerator, we count every payment to the government that is officially considered a tax. Taxes at all levels of government—federal, state, and local—are included in the calculation. In calculating Tax Freedom Day for each state, we look at taxes borne by residents of that state, whether paid to the federal government, their own state or local governments, or governments of other states. Where possible, we allocate tax burdens to each taxpayer’s state of residence. Leap days are excluded, to allow comparison across years, and any fraction of a day is rounded up to the next calendar day.”
Wandering Views 
Anybody with even the slightest grasp on economics understands this, yet our politicians don’t. Looks like reality is slapping them upside the head.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/warning-massachusetts-losing-jobs-with-its-dollar10-minimum-wage/ar-BBrtiqT?li=BBnb7Kz&ocid=U142DHP
“The Bay State, which hiked its minimum wage from $8 to $9 at the start of 2015 and to $10 on the first day of 2016, is now mired in its longest stretch of net job losses since the recession in both the retail and the leisure and hospitality sectors, Labor Department data show.
Retail sector employment in February was down 2,200 from its post-recession peak of 354,100 in July, seasonally adjusted data show. In fact, retail employment is below its level in November 2014, before the first step of the state’s wage hike went into effect.
While the retail sector has no shortage of challenges, especially competition from Amazon (AMZN) and other online rivals, retail employment has been on the rise nationally, growing by 416,000 between November 2014 and February 2016.”
“While earlier figures had pointed to job losses, revisions to the data wiped those losses away. Yet a closer look reveals that the impact of the wage hikes may not be entirely benign after all. In the leisure and hospitality sector, the average workweek over the past year was 1.5 hours shorter than it was in 2013, a drop of 5%.
Here’s an even bigger shock: In this modest pay sector dominated by restaurants and hotels, the average weekly wage of $477.86 in February was actually down 8.3% from $521.29 in June 2014 — before the wage hikes began.
Though some of the data is subject to revision, it seems that the help of higher wages is being offset to a great extent by fewer hours of work and perhaps a leveling of pay scales, as jobs that used to pay far more than the minimum may no longer do so.”
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You’ll need some music to go with this one. Just hit play and read.
————————————–
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/americans-spend-more-on-taxes-than-food-clothing-housing-combined/article/2587799
“A tax advocacy group on Wednesday revealed that Americans spend more on taxes than their whole budget for food, clothing and housing.
The Tax Foundation, in its annual report on when the nation as a whole has earned enough to pay its taxes, announced the date as April 24.”
“— Collectively, Americans will spend more on taxes in 2016 than they will on food, clothing, and housing combined.
— Americans will pay $3.3 trillion in federal taxes and $1.6 trillion in state and local taxes, for a total bill of almost $5.0 trillion, or 31 percent of the nation’s income.”
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Stacking the deck with leftists.
https://pjmedia.com/blog/every-single-one-since-2009-obamas-doj-civil-rights-division-hired-only-leftist-lawyers-hundreds/?singlepage=true
“In 2011, we produced the Every Single One series for PJ Media about an unprecedented wave of ideological hiring of leftist attorneys into the career ranks of the Justice Department. The series documented the partisan and radical background of every single one of the 113 new Justice Department lawyers hired into the Obama Civil Rights Division from January 2009 to January 2011.
With the help of PJ Media, we will now be updating that revealing report — and sharing details about the background of Justice Department attorneys hired since 2011. Because we have obtained all of the resumes of the attorney hires in the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice since then.
And once again, every single one of them has an intensely ideological background.”
“The tentacles of the Division reach into virtually every crevice of American life. Federal statutes, under the banner of protecting civil rights, reach home lending, football stadium and theater seating, voting, elections, education, college admissions, apartment rentals, prisons, hiring practices, the use of English, special education programs, religious liberty, abortion clinic protests, arrests, law enforcement, voter rolls, insane asylums, state and local government hiring, swimming pool lift chairs, bathtub design, Spanish language ballots, school discipline, and even if boys can dress in drag in high school.”
“The Justice Department’s own inspector general recognized this as a problem in a report he released in 2013. The report criticized the Division’s Voting Section for hiring a majority of its lawyers from only five well-known liberal advocacy organizations (including the National Council of La Raza and the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund) and passing “over candidates who had stellar academic credentials and litigation experience with some of the best law firms in the country.”
“We documented instance after instance after instance of abuse of power by the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division. In some cases it involved theft and perjury. In others it involved high heels and comfort horses. It also included “grotesque prosecutorial abuse.” In nearly every instance it involved ideas far outside the mainstream of American life, and far outside the limited legal, statutory authority of the Division.
The old adage goes “personnel is policy.”
If presidential candidates really want to stop the madness, the first place to look is the Civil Rights Division. Many may have read our work at PJ Media and simply assumed a new president can just snap his or her fingers in January 2017 and make it all go away. But alas, no. Most of the lawyers we featured in 2011 are embedded career civil servants and cannot be removed because of the restrictions of a merit protection system 100 years out of date.”
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Classic George Will:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/433726/ted-cruz-donald-trump-contested-convention-favors-cruz
________________________
… Trump is a world-class complainer (he is never being treated “fairly”) but a bush-league preparer. A nomination contest poses policy and process tests, and he is flunking both.
Regarding policy, he is flummoxed by predictable abortion questions because he has been pro-life for only 15 minutes, and because he has lived almost seven decades without giving a scintilla of thought to any serious policy question.
Regarding process, Trump, who recently took a week-long vacation from campaigning, has surfed a wave of free media to the mistaken conclusion that winning a nomination involves no more forethought than he gives to policy. He thinks he can fly in, stroke a crowd’s ideological erogenous zones, then fly away. He knows nothing about the art of the political deal. …
The nomination process, says Jeff Roe, Cruz’s campaign manager, “is a multilevel Rubik’s Cube. Trump thought it was a golf ball — you just had to whack it.” Roe says the Cruz campaign’s engagement with the granular details of delegate maintenance is producing a situation where “the guy who is trying to hijack the party runs into a guy with a machine gun.”
Trump, the perpetually whining “winner,” last won something on March 22, in Arizona. …
______________________
LikeLiked by 1 person
I’ve never been a listener of Rush, but I realize many are. He apparently has been reluctant to take on Trump this year — here’s a column from a listener who laments that, noting the unfortunate division among conservatives that has resulted from the sad smash-up of the (so far) 2016 GOP presidential race.
http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/presidential-campaign/275303-rush-limbaughs-lament
_______________________________________________
A few weeks ago, Jonah Goldberg poignantly put into words how so many of us feel. “I hate this. I hate it. I hate attacking people I respect,” he wrote. He continued: “But I honestly and sincerely don’t see this as a mere principled disagreement. I see this as an argument about whether or not we should set fire to some principles in a foolish desire to get on the right side of some ‘movement.’ I have never been more depressed about the state of American politics or the health of the conservative movement.”
Goldberg’s words echo my sentiments. The worst part about the rise of Trump is how it has forced so many of us to take sides, sides split by an ever-widening divide. And I think that’s where the frustrations that so many of us feel toward Limbaugh lie. So many of us have depended on him for decades to be our voice of conservative reason.
In the first season of HBO’s “True Detective,” Marty asked Rust if he ever wondered if he was a bad man. “No, I don’t wonder,” Rust said. “The world needs bad men. We keep the other bad men from the door.” …
… Trump has shown an astonishing lack of preparedness for the job he seeks. Dismissing his myriad other flaws, his disregard for even the slightest attempt to learn, to grow into the candidate that so many want him to be, should be insulting to a man as intelligent and self-made as Limbaugh. But yet it isn’t. He refuses to identify the bad man at the door.
Friday morning at 11:06 a.m., I tuned in to Limbaugh’s show, just as I do almost every day. Then I did something different: I turned his show off. Not out of anger or frustration, but out of respect for the man whose voice and ideals have served as my political compass through the years. Sadly, he’s not there anymore. And I’d rather remember him that way.
________________________________________________
LikeLike
It’s amazing that now we see proliferation of columns and letters like the one provided by Donna J, as if only *now,* with a guy the likes of *Trump* things have gone (or could go) too far. No, that point is way back there, a number of elections ago, when we Christians committed to a failed lesser of evils approach. It shouldn’t come as any surprise to us that we are where we are, both as a “conservative” movement and a country as a whole. This is what happens when we ignore God. It’s in the Bible.
LikeLike
Please point out to me if I am misunderstanding what is being said. But I am skeptical that we are actually paying more in taxes than on food, clothing, and housing combined. If we are paying, in general, 31% of our income in taxes, & if we are indeed paying more in taxes than on those other needs, then this would mean that we can manage to pay less than 31% of our income on food, clothing, and housing combined. That doesn’t sound right.
What am I missing? Or are those stats an exaggeration?
LikeLike
Karen,
I believe they’re speaking of the country as a whole, based on the billions spent on those 3 combined and all taxes paid combined as well. You can see the details here.
http://taxfoundation.org/article/tax-freedom-day-2016-april-24
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From the link….
“Methodology
In the denominator, we count every dollar that is officially part of net national income according to the Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the numerator, we count every payment to the government that is officially considered a tax. Taxes at all levels of government—federal, state, and local—are included in the calculation. In calculating Tax Freedom Day for each state, we look at taxes borne by residents of that state, whether paid to the federal government, their own state or local governments, or governments of other states. Where possible, we allocate tax burdens to each taxpayer’s state of residence. Leap days are excluded, to allow comparison across years, and any fraction of a day is rounded up to the next calendar day.”
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Thanks.
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